Getting more sophisticated with pay walls

WSJ.com Appoints New “Free Editor”: : (via FishBowl NY) The Wall Street Journal Online is getting serious about opening up more content to attract more subscribers, or at least be smart about it. It has appointed Carl Bialik, one of its former staffers and now a freelancer to be its free-content editor…

Over the last few months, WSJ.com started selectively opening up a few of their stories each day, to get more linkage from bloggers and also use it as a way to showcase their content to get more subscribers. WSJ.com editor Bill Grueskin explained it to us: “The list has grown tremendously since the election and now includes a wide swath of bloggers, along with other sites that want to be alerted to our free links. In fact, it has gotten so big that we have decided to provide a more contextual and targeted approach, with lists of recipients sorted by content. So, for example, once this is fully in gear, a tech blogger will get tech links of the day and won’t wind up sifting through links to stories on politics or the economy (unless she or he wants to). And we wanted to have a smart, web-savvy editor oversee it.” Hence Bialik’s appointment…

So there you go – you can have your cake and eat it too. Less facetiously, this will be an interesting experiment. Can subscription media sites “game” the Googlesphere?